hanging upside down from the rafters

Ghosts (again)

This isn’t a real post – still not going to have time for that till tomorrow or Sunday. But I’ve rewritten Ghosts, and thought I’d post it just to prove I’m still here. It’s hopefully even more disturbing (those of a nervous disposition probably shouldn’t read it), and I’ve experimented with changing the point of view throughout.

Any comments welcome.

Ghosts

Do I live here?

Concrete stairs circle above and below. Bright colours on rough brick walls try to tell me where to go. I don’t understand the language of the spray can. Dismal passages march away in impossible directions. Everything smells of piss.

Perhaps…

I look down at my feet, tell them to take me home.

They seem to know where they’re going.

I need to keep my bearings in this angular world. I cling to the dark wooden hilt, hold the sensuous curve of metal before my face. It reminds me I have a destiny.

The door is a tongue fitting snugly into the mouth of a narrow damp tunnel. There isn’t enough light for me to be able to tell what colour it is. The walls and ceiling are moving inwards, dripping.

I knock twice. She will let me in.

* * *

I’m playing with the children in the living room when he knocks. No-one ever visits us here. A visceral fear I haven’t felt for over a year wraps around my shoulders like an old friend.

I put the chain on before opening the door.

He pushes so hard the chain breaks, then advances slowly. He’s waving a glittering crescent. A knife.

I scream at the boys to hide, and run through the kitchen. I hope he will follow me, as he did many times before. There is a French window leading onto a balcony. I stand to the side, behind a dark green plastic chair, and wait.

That pot plant needs watering.

* * *

I don’t get it. What was that massive bang? Why’s Mum telling us to hide? She sounds scared. I poke my head into the hall.

The front door is wide open and there’s a man with a scary scowly smile walking towards the kitchen. I run back into the room and hide behind the sofa. Billy is already crouching there, making patterns in the dust.

I hope the man doesn’t find us.

* * *

Flashes of betrayal strobe through my mind. Her blood, her bruises, her doctors. Dark uniforms. A room full of people, she stands in a box, I sit in another box, alone. She tells lies. Years in a small room, alone. My blood, my bruises. No doctors.

Where’s the bitch? My knife is slavering, begging me to sink its fang into her chest, slice the over-ripe flesh away from her rotting bones.

* * *

He bursts out of the kitchen, knife lifted high. Cold stones fill his eye sockets, his mouth is tangled in a knot of hatred. I scream and cower. I don’t dare defy him again.

Maybe if I say I’m sorry…

Snarling, he advances. No human lives inside his skin. I tried to pour my humanity into him once, nearly became an animal myself. I use that part of me now. I dive for his legs, lift, feel my muscles tear, topple him over the balcony railings.

* * *

I fall, tumbling over and over. Violent bloody spirals stream from the tip of my blade, painting my rage on the clouds.

* * *

My sons run into the kitchen, laughing.

We hid, like you said,’ says Stevie.

‘Has the man gone?’ says Billy.

‘Yes, darlings, you’re safe now.’ I kneel down to clasp them to me, I want to hold them so tightly they become part of me again, safe within my womb.

As they approach, I look at them, properly look at them.

Billy’s blond hair is matted with gore. His cheek is ripped open and he has been stabbed many times. Stevie’s throat is gaping and he has a dark red apron of blood.

This is like sewing. I used to watch my mother and her mother sew by hand, some pretty complicated stuff. Some of their work had many sides to form one amazingly unified piece. This story reminds me of that. And it has an accelaration in tension with each section. And a climax that makes you gasp. Nicely done.

[…] Ghosts was based on a nightmare I had many years ago. The initial version was short and stark, written almost exactly as I remember the dream. I found I’d instinctively pre-edited to remove the ending, where the mother runs to the living room and sees the dead bodies of her children. It was much more powerful to end when the mother realises that her children are ghosts. […]

You’ve packed so much into such a short piece. Well done. I particularly like the use of the present tense for that sense of immediacy, even urgency. The PoV switches work very well because you’ve kept them short and rapid. The reader comes to expect the switches after only a few scenes.

Perhaps it was a deliberate decision, in order to accelerate the pace, but I felt your descriptions trailed off after the first couple of scenes, concentrating instead on action.

A well paced piece and you control POV well. The ending is a shock, as it should be, I found myself reading the final section twice to get the full impact, just as the mother has to look twice at her kids. Nice touch as my reader experience mirrored the characters.

This is a great little read. I read the whole thing as if all four of them were ghosts – each reliving, over and over, the events. (is that as it was meant?) That perspective actually works really well, especially if you were to switch out the last line with something as if that was totally normal…something about resuming the game, or whatever, as if the gore was how they always looked to her. But reading it that way, as if they were all dead, from the beginning, it’s very cool how the impressions get more and more corporeal as the climactic events get closer and closer – as if the death event enfleshes each of them, and then they cross over, to the beginning. very nice job! I’m enjoying your work!